“I made the mistake of moving, and I was shot again,” one wounded soldier later told Cone.

Before the first ambulance arrived, soldiers were tearing off their clothes to make bandages for the wounded, Sgt. Andrew Hagerman said.

“You had people without tops on. You had people ripping their pant legs off,” said Hagerman.

He said he looked down to avoid stepping in the pools of blood or kicking any spent shell casings. “You could go around it,” he said. “There was definitely a path.”

“It was an exceptional scene. It was a terrible thing,” said Chuck Medley, the fort’s director of emergency services. “When I got there, soldiers were doing what soldiers do. They were protecting, evacuating the injured soldiers to secure locations.”